Warwickshire wildman starts to make up for lost time

Paul Smith, who has always been less role model than roll-your-own model, looks even more out of place now as a former cricketer than he did as a player. Last week visiting Worcester, that most English of cricket grounds, where tea and cakes are prepared in the ladies pavilion, in the shadow of the cathedral and beside the Severn, he appeared more incongruous than ever with his long hair and baseball cap, his casual clothes not matched by the fierce intensity of his handsome features.

He resembles the rock star, one senses, he always wanted to be - and at 43 he is almost old enough to be one. The only ordinary thing about Smith is his name and he has just written an outrageous autobiography, Wasted?, which is at once badly written and compelling reading. It is shocking, maddening, scatological and - no pun intended - disjointed. It is not so much kiss and tell as kiss, have casual sex, get stoned, drunk, divorced, unemployed, homeless, penniless and tell; and it would make Dorian Gray blush.

Smith - "cricket's first bimbo" according to Dermot Reeve - was an all-rounder in the Warwickshire side that won an unprecedented three trophies in 1994. His batting average of 26 and bowling average of 36 suggest mediocrity but he was better than that, a genuine impact player who could bowl fast and hit long, though never well enough to play for England.

By 1997, however, he was no player at all. After descending into drug addiction he was banned for 22 months for bringing the game into disrepute. "The time I started taking drugs to the time I knew I was finished as a player took just 18 months," he says. "I was fingered and I covered for a lot of other people. If you take drugs you've got an issue that needs to be addressed. It doesn't make you a bad person. I'm tinged with that but I don't give a monkey's what people think about me."

If that's the case, though, why is the early part of the book a painful explanation of how he was more a victim of circumstance than a cocaine and ecstasy addict? He wonders why the game did not help him more and why other players with drug problems got away with it, comparatively speaking.

The man, unsurprisingly, is as chaotic and vague as the book he has spawned - at one stage it ran to 700,000 words before a friend helped him edit it. A single sentence can span several time zones and his conversation sometimes comes across as a mixture of Joyce's stream of consciousness and Kenneth Williams' Rambling Syd Rumpo.

His suggestion that he did not waste his talent is plain wrong for, despite the seven trophies he won, he hardly played after he was 30. His other contention that it was not his fault, that it only happened because the pressures of a benefit coincided with the club's peak of success, is equally daft, as is his notion that Warwickshire were the Manchester United of cricket.

Somewhere in the pages, though, and it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where, he does have a point. Cricket has always been a deeply conservative game, with big and small C's, and it is interesting to remember that at about the same time Ed Giddins was banned from the game for taking cocaine Arsenal's Paul Merson, who had similar problems, was supported and pointed towards rehabilitation.

Already, a decade after Smith left the game, we live in a more liberal and tolerant society. One day some drugs might be legalised and the days when a sportsman got into trouble for taking recreational drugs that were not performance-enhancing may be frowned upon. Smith's worst crime, perhaps, was to be born at the wrong time. Drugs were not the only problem. He recalls going out to bat at Bournemouth against Malcolm Marshall, of all people, when "three sheets to the wind".

"'Don't worry, Smitty boy,' Malcolm said, 'this won't take long.' He was as good as his word. After a few minutes I was on my way - initially walking in the wrong direction, away from the pavilion."

Smith lost his marriage and his home. He also went long periods without food. "It's not so bad after 24 hours - you stop feeling the pain.

"The worst time I remember, though, was at a place in Los Angeles called EJ, standing for Execution Jungle, because so many people get killed there. I remember standing there washing cars to help raise the $4,600 (roughly £3,000 at then current exchange rates) we needed to bury a kid we'd coached. This is real crack and crystal-meth territory."

But it is also the territory of his Cricket Without Boundaries, for in recent years this most dissolute of sportsmen has proved that he is also a decent human being. "I did my best work after 1997," he says. "It's just that what I did before 1997 is better chronicled."

Smith has found redemption by using cricket to transform the lives of homeless, hopeless youngsters in Los Angeles, and working for the Prince's Trust in Birmingham.

"The moment I got banned I knew exactly what I wanted to do and it's this. One day I will be managing a cricket team in LA, proving to the world that cricket can change people's lives."

One chapter of his book is called Compton, not an appreciation of Denis but about the place in southern LA where he bases himself. "In 2014 I would rather be sitting in a park in the middle of Compton than at Edgbaston at some 20th anniversary dinner of Warwickshire's treble season."

The book, which he describes as "the most open ever written", is almost Faustian in tone but at the same time can be laugh-aloud funny. It includes, for example, a team-mate's claim that he lost his virginity with a chicken and the story of the Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness being asked to play a game of cricket against John Major's government.

Then there was the time he joined the mile-high club on a pre-season flight to Cape Town. When the toilet door was forced open and a sheepish Smith returned to his seat the late Bob Woolmer, the Warwickshire coach, angrily asked: "Were you wearing your club blazer when the doors were opened?"

Smith says: "I laughed, not out of disrespect, more because of the absurdity of the whole situation. I believe that was the moment he washed his hands of me and that I'd become a lost cause."

Smith never was the star he craved to be - his book is one long list of celebrity encounters, of drunken binges with George Best, sharing a bottle of brandy with Sir Garfield Sobers, meeting Ian Botham, Billy Wright, Prince Charles and Muhammad Ali as well as rock stars like Roger Daltrey, Jimmy Page and Michael Hutchence, not to mention Bryan Ferry. No name has been undropped.

Just hours after we spoke, though, he met someone even more important, a baby daughter, his fourth child. He had two sons with his wife, Caroline.

There is another daughter - with another girlfriend - who he has not seen for two years. "I don't even know what country she lives in." His new-found happiness also reminds him of his greatest sadness.

Wasted? The Incredible True Story of Cricket's First Rock 'n' Roll Star is published by Know The Score. Price £16.99

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